Department of English

This course seeks to introduce students to the modern British novel by considering several works in the context of major aesthetic and political movements of the twentieth century. We will trace the fate of modernism across the century, considering formal innovations in the novel against the background of colonialism, the World Wars, class conflict, immigration, racial violence, and shifts in the meaning of gender and sexuality. The course focuses in particular on the relationship between violence and subjectivity: we will read these novels as aesthetic responses to a set of disorienting and disturbing historical events. Authors likely to include: Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Jean Rhys, J.M. Coetzee, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Rachel Cusk. Short writing assignments throughout the semester; a final paper (10 pp); a final exam.